Reviews tagged education

Like many of my generation, I am a child of divorce. I watched as my newly single mother struggled to work, find and pay for childcare, and afford lawyers that could compete with my father’s during endless days of court. I watched as we plummeted into poverty while my wealthy father’s lifestyle barely changed. I am the daughter of a woman who chose to sacrifice her career to raise me, and who was subsequently penalized by a system that encouraged her to do precisely that.

In Northeast Philadelphia’s Frankford High School, students swipe IDs to gain access to the cafeteria at lunchtime. They pass through metal detectors. Police greet them after school. Forty percent of their classmates will drop out before senior year. So why are Frankford students showing up at school in the wee hours of the morning to tournée potatoes while a teacher screams at them?
Students show up because teacher Wilma Stephenson demands their dedication to culinary arts training, and earns their respect with her expertise and her results.

The subtitle of of JLove Calderón and Marcella Runell’s curriculum, Love, Race, and Liberation, comes from the poem “Dream Variations” by Langston Hughes.
To fling my arms wide
In some place of the sun,
To whirl and to dance
Till the white day is done.
Love, Race, and Liberation is a multimedia project

The award-winning documentary Speaking in Tongues spells out an intriguing paradox of America’s identity: Although we’re a nation that prides itself on diversity, we also militantly cling to monolingual education at the expense of culture, communication, and even academic achievement.
Speaking in Tongues follows four San Francisco children, all of whom attend either a Spanish or Chinese immersion public school: a young African-American boy who lives in public housing but is gaining fluency at his Chinese school;

In Transforming Faith, Sadaf Ahmad explores the role of Al-Huda, a women’s Islamic religious school, in promoting the spread of a particular kind of Islam, especially among educated middle- and upper-class women in Islamabad, Pakistan.
Ahmad sets the scene by situating her topic in an historical and global context. She provides a broad overview of the various branches of Islam, and she tells the history of Pakistan’s self-conception as an Islamic state.

In Love the Questions, Ian Angus attempts to document the evolution of the university as a social institution, the problems presented by recent shifts in the structure and funding of the modern university, and possible solutions that will allow for modernization without the loss of the university’s most vital traditional roles.

When Septima Clark began teaching in 1919, she quickly learned that good education is very much like community organizing. Both start by identifying pressing needs, involve the affected in formulating solutions, and give them a stake in the final outcome.

Ida Lichter’s Muslim Women Reformers ambitiously highlights the work of Muslim women around the globe involving an array of interrelated issues, including lack of gender equity in education and the workplace, domestic violence, human trafficking, biased family law practices, and rape with impunity.

Few phrases in the English language conjure up more vivid fantasies than the words all-girl school. The education of women—especially in an all-girl environment—is highly political. The ACLU has made the argument that single-sex education has not proven to be noticeably effective, and that it in fact weakens Title IX. There is a constellation of preconceptions that swirl around single-sex education.

As sprawl becomes less environmentally acceptable, foreclosures soar, and media trumpet the end of the suburban dream, the suburbs or at least some of them, have emerged as a problem, rather than as a solution. Although the house prices in the true islands of affluence have fallen, crime, drugs, and gangs are emerging in suburban neighborhoods abandoned to working-class and immigrant people.

From the moment the film started, the audience of An Education had a collective understanding that what we were about to see no longer applied. Based on the memoir of British journalist Lynn Barber, the film opens with a nostalgically ridiculous montage of ‘60s-era schoolgirls learning their daily lessons: cooking, ballroom dancing, and walking with proper posture (books-on-heads and all).

In July, I wrote a post about Nicholas D. Kristof's announcing a "special issue" of the New York Times Sunday Magazine that would cover women in the developing world. Well, that issue is now available online, and will be arriving to the doorsteps of NYT subscribers in a few days.

No regular news consumer could avoid being informed of the failings of the educational system in the U.S. Every medium, new and old, is filled with the details of this country’s abysmal international rankings, the breakdown of school discipline, the costs of teaching to the test, the soaring dropout rate and the dearth of funding that leads school systems to abandon arts programs and other educational necessities. What is often left unexamined is one of the primary causes of many of these problems: de facto segregation by race and class.

Most of the attention Dr. Leonard Sax gets is for his advocacy of single sex education for boys. In his first book, Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know about the Emerging Science of Sex Differences, Sax described the developmental and biological differences between the sexes and how contemporary early education puts boys at a disadvantage.

The Music Teacher is a story of failure. It is the story of what could have been, but wasn’t—because of neglect, because of abuse, or for the simple reason that not everyone succeeds. Most people fail.
Protagonist Pearl Swain is one of these failures. Swain was a gifted violinist, but her father hated (and feared) her passion for music so strongly that he burned her violin in a backyard fire.

At first, Whatever It Takes looks like the opening of a murder-mystery TV show, as a man gets ready for work. But it isn’t—it’s really Edward Tom, a new principal getting ready for the first day of school at a school in the South Bronx, New York. Named for the Bronx Center for Science and Mathematics, the high school is part of the state’s new education reforms: smaller schools to assist high risk students.
The principal and teachers alike pay attention to all 108 kids, hoping to encourage them to succeed. The film covers the 2005-2006 academic year.

Nostalgia is front and center in Wadad Makdisi Cortas’ atmospheric memoir of life in Beirut, a war-torn city once belonging to Syria and later, the capital of Lebanon. Born in 1909, Cortas died in 1979, but her impassioned account of a four-decade career as principal of the Ahliah School for Girls touches on themes that remained pertinent throughout the twentieth century—colonialism and the founding of Israel, among them.
Cortas was fiercely committed to the education of girls and sought international examples to prod her students into imagining an array of possibilities for their lives.

This dense volume brings together a wealth of scholarly essays that address the topic of integration in American schools in the early twenty-first century. The book is the fruit of a collaborative research roundtable convened by the Southern Poverty Law Center and Harvard University in 2004.
2004 was also the fiftieth anniversary of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka that led to the end of legal segregation in American schools.

While it would help to appreciate and admire the historical importance of preserved letters, you don’t have to be history buff or correspondence enthusiast to delight in Letters From Black America. In a time of quickly typed emails and SMS, tangible letters hold weight for many who value thoughtful, deliberate communication.

The Pure Romance website looks like a page out of Seventeen magazine with pictures of giggly, freckle-faced women and hearts and cursive, all splashed in shades of pink. And while the company’s mission is serious—empowering women to express and explore their sexuality—the products have the same playful feel the homepage reveals.
Pure Romance products range from light lotions to bondage accessories to vibrators, available in seven collections at prices that span a few dollars through $150.

Turning the Tide: Challenging the Right on Campus includes an inspirational foreword by Howard Zinn. Informative is an understatement; this analysis provides a detailed account of right-wing and extremist vindictiveness on college campuses. This 40-page booklet includes a brief historical overview of the conflict between proponents of religious instruction and progressives who value free thinking in higher education.

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